When I power on my machine, I have auto-login enabled. After auto-login I start Vivaldi browser. Unlock keyring pops up. Then I have to write my password anyway. Why?

  • WetGeek and elfprince replied to this.

    • [deleted]

    • Best Answerset by qk4-li3

    Chromium applications like Vivaldi will create an entry in the libsecret backend (gnome-keyring on Budgie) often regardless of whether or not you actually do anything that requires it. gnome-keyring requires a password to unlock the vault, this defaults to the password that you set when you installed the system. When you do not have auto-login enabled the greeter (lightdm for Budgie by default) captures your password when you login to the session and feeds that to gnome-keyring in order to automatically unlock it. When you have auto-login enabled this auto-unlock never happens which is why gnome-keyring needs to be unlocked manually when it's invoked for the first time in a session.

    This is all expected behavior, though it is often surprising to people using auto-login who are not familiar with it. You pretty much have only a few options here:

    1. Ignore it and just accept that you'll need to enter your password whenever you start something that uses libsecret to store encryption keys or credentials.
    2. Disable auto-login so that your password is captured when you login via the greeter and gnome-keyring is unlocked with that password.
    3. Change the gnome-keyring password to an empty string. Note that this will remove encryption from all secrets protected by gnome-keyring and all secrets will be readable by any application that has read access to your home directory. This is insecure and I would not recommend this.

    qk4-li3 Then I have to write my password anyway. Why?

    My guess: There are applications on our computers that need to know who the user is. When you implement auto-login, your computer starts up with no idea who's using it. Unless that computer is on a public marketing kiosk, or similar, that's a very bad idea, and you've seen that you still need to type your password anyway.

    If typing your password requires such huge effort on your part, you might want to look into the idea of hibernation. Then you'd only have to type it once a week, or as often as you update and reboot. Whenever you turn on your computer, the previous session would continue from where it was when you shut the computer down, but you'd still have the safety and convenience of being logged in.

    Do you think you could manage logging on that often?

        This probably is because you have passwords/login-data stored in vivaldi. This confidential data gets stored in a keyring for security reasons. On login with password, this keyring gets unlocked, which is not the case on auto-login for obvious reasons.
        For reference see this post

          Sebastian On login with password, this keyring gets unlocked, which is not the case on auto-login for obvious reasons.

          No, I don't understand why? What would those "obvious reasons" be?

            WetGeek Thanks for suggestion, but I don't hibernate any of my machines ever, for various reasons.
            I don't know if typing password is huge effort, but I know I'm not going to do it if I just can avoid it.

                qk4-li3 I'm not going to do it if I just can avoid it.

                Your computer, and your choice in what you do with it. I suspect you'll change your mind when you're a little bit older, but what you do about it now doesn't affect me at all. I'm just wondering why you ask for help in the forum when you don't really want any.

                You can ignore this reply, too, if you want to. I won't be trying to help you again unless your attitude changes.

                    qk4-li3 I have same situation with using Brave browser, and also having auto-login enabled.
                    Was annoying for a while, but I made peace with it. How long does it take to type in your password, a couple of seconds.

                        elfprince

                        elfprince How long does it take to type in your password, a couple of seconds

                        Well... what is then the purpose of auto-login? It becomes useless exercise. Why does it even exist?
                        edit. was this blunt expression too...(?)

                              WetGeek Oh, I'm terribly sorry. I cant' see how I was rude. Forgive me my choice of words. Was I too "blunt", perhaps? English is not my native language, Finnish is. Finns tend to be perhaps too "straight" with communication. Or perhaps I overlooked the amount of text you kindly wrote. I apologize.

                                It's sometimes hard to write something when there's no "tone" in text.

                                I'm genuinely wondering this "auto-login" phenomenon.

                                • [deleted]

                                • Post #13
                                • Edited

                                Vivaldi stores some data (saved passwords, iirc) on the keyring and the automatic login unfortunately doesn't unlock the keyring automatically. The behavior is the same with gnome-keyring and kwallet. There are workarounds for that, such as setting an empty password as the keyring password, but you're on your own to evaluate the potential security implications on that.

                                In my point of view, you weren't rude.

                                  [deleted] In my point of view, you weren't rude.

                                  No, "rude" isn't the word I would have used. (And I didn't.)

                                    [deleted] Vivaldi stores some data (saved passwords, iirc) on the keyring and the automatic login unfortunately doesn't unlock the keyring automatically. The behavior is the same with gnome-keyring and kwallet. There are workarounds for that, such as setting an empty password as the keyring password, but you're on your own to evaluate the potential security implications on that.

                                    Yep, thanks this is a bit like what @Sebastian wrote too, well, hmm... it's just the way things are then. I find it very strange though. I mean auto-login really appears to be "useless exercise" then. I'm sure I'm not the last person who will ponder this when it "works" like this.

                                      It's Linux--you got to roll with it.
                                      I would just
                                      A) rip all passwords out of vivaldi (disable it) and cut and paste from a password manager so you never have use that stupid keyring again.
                                      then B) uninstall/reinstall vivaldi
                                      or
                                      C) use another browser purely for login accounts.
                                      or
                                      I wonder if you monkey with anything in /.config/vivaldi vivaldi settings?
                                      or
                                      type 'disable vivaldi keyring prompt' into DDG and see if there's an easy fix
                                      or
                                      see if it persists if you make solus autostart it

                                      that is the end of my brain🙂

                                        brent

                                        brent It's Linux--you got to roll with it

                                        Hah! How uplifting post!
                                        One thing... I DON'T have any passwords stored in vivaldi. I never store any passwords in my browser.
                                        Other points you made... I must think about them for awhile
                                        Another thing comes to mind: This is quite recent install of Solus and I remember enabling auto-login (during install), which later I found out that, that setting didn't stick. So I enabled it again via Budgie Control Centre!
                                        I have not messed with ./config/vivaldi settings. Vivaldi has been updated like everything else in this quite recent install.
                                        DDG=duckduckgo, right?

                                            Could it be as easy and a clean cache/history?
                                            or uninstall/reinstall plus throw away to trash every folder connected to vivaldi in /home, after uninstall..
                                            you lose your bookmarks but maybe no keyring

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                                              • Post #20

                                              brent No. Vivaldi and other Chromium browsers want keyring access regardless of whether there are any saved passwords.